Wednesday, October 24, 2012

JEFFREY LORIA KILLED THE MIAMI MARLINS, LONG LIVE THE POOP-FLINGING MONKEYS

"I'm not a big believer in [organizational dysfunction]. Are you talking about front
office dysfunction? Are you talking about ownership? Are you talking about players not liking each other? There are all sorts of things that happen over the course of a year. I don't think any issues that would occur between upper management and field management would cause Gaby [Sanchez] to hit .215 and Logan [Morrison] to hit .230 and Hanley to hit .240. I just don't believe in that. I really don't. I think that when players take the field, they don't care about managers, they don't care about owners, they don't care about presidents or GMs. They're out there doing the best they can to win up to their ability.
We evaluate what their ability should be, and when they're not performing to it, we're the ones who are wrong. It has nothing to do with any potential dysfunctions in my mind. Hanley Ramirez? He could care less about me, [president of baseball operations] Larry [Beinfest], Jeffrey, Ozzie. And I'm not saying this just about Hanley. He's out there just trying to hit.I think there's a lot that goes into it. To win, a lot of things have got to go right. You have to hit it right. You have to have players who overperform. And we just did not have any players who overperformed. In 2003, when we won it all, we had seven players who overperformed. In '05, when we had a better team and we didn't make the playoffs, we had seven players who underperformed. And that's what we have this year, too."

“It’s easy to say, ‘Well Ozzie didn’t do this, Larry didn’t do that
and Jeffrey didn’t do this and David did that,’” Beinfest said. “I think
it’s real easy to do a lot of that right now, but it’s all of us. If
Hanley didn’t perform, you know what? I was part of the negotiating team
that gave him the long-term contract. I was part of the decision-making
team that kept him here and wanted him to perform. Gave him to Ozzie
and Joey Cora to work on his fielding at third base.“All those things. It’s everybody. To say, ‘Well, this didn’t happen
because of him’ or ‘This didn’t happen because of him’ I think is
really tough to do right now. When you hear these things out there, the
whole organization is under review and the whole organization is
responsible for what’s happened. I believe that. Ultimately, it’s up to
Jeffrey to decide if he wants to make changes and say this component of
my decision-making team or this component of my field team or whatever
it is isn’t up to snuff, that’s obviously his decision. To lay it all on
Ozzie, and say you know what, Ozzie gets the blame just as much as I
do, that’s just the way it is right now, but everybody has to kind of
wear this one.”-Larry Beinfest

And yet, somehow (and it's not all that surprising, really), nobody in the front office wore this one.

The manager was supposed to do what, exactly, with this comedy of front office fuck-ups?

Firing Ozzie Guillen after one season isn't the dumbest thing this organization has done, but it is part of a larger, more serious problem. The problem, of course, is that Jeffrey Loria is a fat seal in desperate need of a good clubbing.

With Loria's stubby fingers all over this franchise, nothing positive can ever happen. No, the types of things that can happen when Jeffrey Loria is allowed to run amok are John Buck-type things. Heath Bell-type things. One-year-manager-type things.

Signing a high-profile manager--one of the most inconsequential positions in all of professional sports--to a large contract, only to wind up eating $7.5 million of it to get rid of him less than a year later? That's the type of organizational direction that, well, leaves you with John Buck at catcher, I suppose.

And not only does Jeffrey Loria have no idea what he's doing, but he keeps doing things that would suggest that he has no idea that he has no idea what he's doing.

There was tepid interest in [Heath] Bell by the Marlins baseball people. Loria decided there was complete interest to the point he negotiated the $27 million deal that looks as silly to everyone now as it did to Marlins baseball people when it was presented.

Let Larry Beinfest do his job or fire him for being bad at it. Loria chose neither.

Jeffrey Loria overstepping his bounds and ignoring the people that he, himself, put in charge of making decisions makes me rage with the fire of a thousand suns. His inability to recognize where his organization's problems stem from (hint: the fucking mirror) makes me unreasonably stabby. He's an idiot savant, without the savant. He's real-life trolling the shit out of an entire fan base and he doesn't even mean to. You have to think that he genuinely believes he's making all the right moves and they just aren't working out. That Joe Girardi and Fredi Gonzalez and Ozzie Guillen were all fired because they weren't good fits for the club, and it had absolutely nothing to do with him being a megalomaniacal shit stain that has no clue how to run a baseball team.

The Miami Poop-Flinging Monkeys (as I will refer to them from now until Walrus Face is gone) are a team without direction. So much so that Jeff Ireland has a picture of them on his wall, because it makes him feel better about himself. Clusterfucks look at the Poop-Flinging Monkeys and say to themselves, "My god, what a clusterfuck." Poop-flinging monkeys are offended that I even called this team the Poop-Flinging Monkeys.

And the depressing part is that none of this will ever be fixed until the art dealer-slash-sea cow sells the team and/or swims with a toaster. We're stuck with this bloated gargoyle for the long haul, our hands tied. Even if he does accidentally make a decent decision and winds up firing the right guy one of these days, he's just going to do this meddling bullshit all over again with the next guy. And the guy after that. And the guy after that. Depressed yet?

Jeffrey Loria isn't killing baseball in South Florida (though, that might be preferable). What he's actually doing is far worse. When you murder a franchise--say, the Expos, for instance--you give the city a chance to move on. You give them enough time to get through the pain and find something else to occupy that once-empty, now-yearning spot in their hearts. But, what Shitty McDickwad is doing to the people of Miami is criminal. He cruelly saved baseball in South Florida only to subject its fans to another decade (or two, fuck my life) of the ongoing fuckery and suffering that we're currently living on a daily basis. Instead of being shot in the head, we're going to be stabbed and patched up, stabbed and patched up, stabbed and patched up for-fucking-ever. Seattle Supersonics fans can eat dirty anus, because this is far more frustrating and painful than anything they've ever had to endure.

A little over two years ago, this site was launched, inspired by the great Zoo With Roy. In that time, the amount of support I've received from you internet strangers has been staggering. I don't do this to get famous, and I don't even care if I go to the strip club with GIANCARLOCRUZMICHAELSTANTON anymore. I do this for you. Because I [heart] you. And I think that deep down, you [heart] me, too.